Journal Article

Heart rate variability is enhanced during mindfulness practice: A randomized controlled trial involving a 10-day online-based mindfulness intervention

Axelsen, Johanne L., Kirk, Ulrich

2020

Overview

The goal of the present study was to probe the effects of mindfulness practice in a naturalistic setting as opposed to a lab-based environment in the presence of continuous heart rate variability (HRV) measurements. The specific experimental goals were to examine the effects of a brief 10-day online-based mindfulness intervention on both chronic and acute HRV responses. We conducted a fully randomized 10-day longitudinal trial of mindfulness practice, explicitly controlling for practice effects with an active-control group (music listening) and a non-intervention control group. To assess chronic cardiovascular effects, we asked participants in the 3 groups to complete 2-day HRV pre- and post-intervention measurement sessions. Using this experimental setup enabled us to address training effects arising from mindfulness practice to assess physiological impact on daytime as well as nighttime (i.e. assessing sleep quality) on the underlying HRV response. To assess acute cardiovascular effects, we measured HRV in the 2 active intervention groups during each of the 10 daily mindfulness or music sessions. This allowed us to track the development of purported training effects arising from mindfulness practice relative to the active-control intervention in terms of changes in the HRV slope over the 10-day time-course. Firstly, for the acute phase we found increased HRV during the daily practice sessions in both the mindfulness and active-control group indicating that both interventions were effective in decreasing acute physiological stress. Secondly, for the chronic phase we found increased HRV in both the day- and nighttime indicating increased sleep quality, specifically in the mindfulness group. These results suggest causal effects in both chronic and acute phases of mindfulness practice in formerly naïve subjects and provides support for the argument that brief online-based mindfulness interventions exert positive impact on HRV.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: Active control / Acute Disease / Adult / Biology and Life Sciences / Cardiovascular Diseases - pathology / Chronic Disease / Daytime / Design / Electrophysiology / Female / Heart beat / Heart rate / Heart Rate - physiology / Humans / Hypotheses / Intervention / Longitudinal Studies / Male / Medicine and Health Sciences / Middle Aged / Mindfulness / Mindfulness - methods / Mindfulness meditation / Music / Nervous system / Night / Nighttime / Non-pharmacological intervention / Physical Sciences / Physiological aspects / Physiological effects / Physiology / Psychological aspects / Quality assessment / Research and Analysis Methods / Respiration / Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted / Sleep / Sleep - physiology / Social Sciences / Stress / Stress (physiology) / Stress, Psychological / Training / Variability